In Han-tastic China, the ethnic conflict card strikes me as awfully dubious, the last gasp of the stability-first position. Even without China’s success in Sinicizing minorities, there’s just two few of them to make Balkanization a possibility. A regional fragmentation of China along economic and political lines is far more likely, which is one reason why Hu brought the hammer down on Jiang Zemin’s so-called Shanghai clique.

Did you guys bring up Barrington Moore at all during the conversation? Moore’s thesis was the states making the transition towards democracy usually had to eliminate — through war, education, or migration — their agricultural populations. A counterpoint might be India, but when looking at the China examples, Moore’s thesis seems to support why Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, increasingly, Singapore are more suited for democracy than the mainland.

I think if anything pushes the Chinese towards democracy in the near term, it will be environmental problems. The top-down model isn’t responsive enough to environmental concerns at the national level and has led to outright abuse at the local level. Along these lines, it’s not hard to look at the Xiamen environmental protests and see them as a hint at the future of Chinese democracy.

Ditto.

But in general, I would advise against the US or anybody trying to influence China’s political structure and “domestic affairs”. Just imagine some foreign country trying to do the same to the US, I don’t think it would bode well with the American public.